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Two poems by Helen Mundler

Recipes from The Ontological Cookbook

Helen E. Mundler-Arantes

12.12.2025

Butterbraedle

500 g plain flour
250 g butter
250 g brown sugar
Vanilla essence to taste
Two whole eggs
One additional egg yolk

Combine the butter, eggs, sugar, vanilla and flour. Pull into a ball and put in the fridge to chill for four hours.

Get it out after 90 minutes because you don’t have the patience to wait.

Roll it out and stamp out crescent moons, Christmas trees, Mannele and stars.

Wonder if you’re misgendering the Mannele: admonish yourself for assuming it’s a male, just because it’s not wearing a skirt.

Wonder what the feminine of Mannele is.

Go and look it up.

Find Weible, think about how Wife in English meant woman before it meant spouse.

Think of Chaucer and the Wyf of Bath. Wonder whether someone with five husbands can be more defined as a wife than someone with just one, or maybe less.

Think about being defined as a wife. Feel joy.

Feel also surprise, and wonder how you manage this every time.

Think about Alewife in Boston. Try to remember which metro line it was.

Get back to stamping out the shapes and lay them on the baking parchment.

Have more fun than you’ve had baking since you were ten.

Think about your Let’s Bake set and wonder what happened to the mushroom cutter.

Feel a little sad.

Eggwash the Butterbraedle, sprinkle them with sugar on your own initiative; hope to make them sparkle.

Bake for twelve minutes.

Observe the sharpness of the edges and conclude that ninety minutes was just fine.

Cool the biscuits, then put them on a plate and take a photo.

Wish you’d used a different colour for the plate.

Serve some on a plate in a better colour, and put the others in a tin, which must be made of white steel.

Think about what this could mean.

Decide to use the Whistles tin from Cornwall: go through every memory, one by one; think in particular about that euphoric disintegration occasioned by the sight of wildflowers growing out of a stone wall.

Zimtsterne

Ingredients

260g wholemeal ground almonds
250g white sugar
15g cinammon
Two egg whites, beaten to stiff peaks
1 tspn lemon juice

Feel flushed with success.

Decide to make another sort.

Read the recipe for Zimsterne and worry about the raw eggwhite in the icing.

Wonder if the geese at the pool have bird flu.

Wonder if you should really be swimming with them.

Realise you actually bake the icing so the bird flu will be killed.

Think how bizarre it is, to bake biscuits with the icing on.

Understand that baked biscuit dough can’t be rerolled and used again.

Think about the waste.

Consult the internet: confirm that cinnamon tiles are actually a thing: decide not to make the stars.

Whisk the eggwhites. Fold into two thirds of the eggwhites two thirds of the sugar, add all the ground almonds.

Roll out; swear loudly when it sticks like hell.

Combine the remaining sugar, lemon juice and egg white to make the glaze, then cheat as intended, cutting tiles, not stars.

Consider baking another batch of Butterbraedele, this time only stars, in several sizes. Wonder what it means to make biscuits which embody what other biscuits should really be, but cannot.

Wonder why the urge to make these substitute biscuits is so strong.

Wonder if it’s something to do with the metonymical chain.

Wonder if actually it’s more metaphorical.

Wonder if in fact it’s Lacanian.

Worry that Alsatian women do not think about these things while baking Braedele.

If ontological drift occurs, like powdered snow banking by a low wall, like dried leaves on the wind,

Rush outside, grab it firmly, and put it back.

See p.136 for reversing the direction of driven snow and fixing windblown leaves back on the trees.

Bring to mind the reversal of the direction of flow of the Chicago River.

Get back to baking Braedele in your kitchen.

Think of things that women think of.

Think about what they call “cognitive style”; wonder if counts as a dialect.

Wonder if you should sing songs in it like they do in Alsatian, to be sure not to lose any words.

Wonder if a dialect counts if you only speak it to yourself.

Wonder if it’s too singular for other people.

Wonder if it’s you who are too singular for other people.

Bake the tiles at 180 degrees until firm.

Cool and serve.


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Helen Mundler (15 décembre 2025). Two poems by Helen Mundler. LOOP. Consulté le 9 février 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15cm9


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